Woman held in WWII internment camp gets diploma

San Diego 
An 89-year-old woman who was forced to live in an internment camp during World War II has reclaimed one of the many things she lost in 1942 - a high school education.

Japanese-American Yoshiko Golden received her honorary diploma on Wednesday from the San Diego County Board of Education's Operation Recognition program. It came 70 years after the war forced her to drop out of high school, the U-T San Diego newspaper (
http://bit.ly/15CaUuW
) reported.

"I always said I would go back to school. Of course, I never did after the war," she told the newspaper. "This means a lot to me."

It has been 25 years since the Civil Liberties Act was signed by then-President Ronald Reagan to compensate more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in the relocation camps. The executive order offered a formal apology and $20,000 to each camp survivor.

The apology addressed to Golden and a copy of her check is displayed in a frame in her home. She intends to add her diploma to that collection.

More than 120,000 people were forced to live in the camps, said David Kawamoto of San Diego, past president of the National Japanese American Citizens League.

"It was the largest depravation of constitutional rights of U.S. citizens in our history, and people need to be aware of it," Kawamoto told the newspaper.

Born Yoshiko Maeyama on the kitchen table of her family's farm house in Oxnard, Golden helped tend crops of strawberries and broccoli. She was 16 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and barely 17 when the U.S. government herded her family to an internment camp in Arizona.

Most of the incarcerated people were from the West Coast. They packed only what they could carry before boarding trains to the camps.

Golden was able to leave the camp after less than two years under a work furlough program that sent her to work at a hotel in Chicago, according to the newspaper. She later joined her family in San Diego.

After the graduation ceremony on Wednesday, Golden posed for pictures with family members. She donned a purple cap and gown that the family had borrowed for the event.

Previously, only war veterans were eligible for the diplomas, but Golden's son said he applied on behalf of his mother when the program opened up to others.

"My mom did a lot to make her children's lives better," he said. "This is my way of giving something to my mother."